about those awful tickets and perhaps there was something the matter and they would come and turn us out of the box. What would the girls do to me and what would the people think and who was that man and who was responsible for the tickets? I was beginning to wish I had never heard of “The Golden Quest” and was sure I couldn’t stand it till the third act, when the usher and the man turned around and went out to the box office. Something was going to happen. What could I do? Here were the five girls at the heights of bliss and anticipation, and here was I in the depths of anxious misery, and there were the five young men staring coolly around, waiting for their friend, and there was the man out at the box office probably demanding that I be seized and turned with my friends into the streets. But what could I do? It wasn’t my fault, for the tickets had been sent to me, surely. Perhaps they had been stolen and sent to me as a revenge from some inhuman enemy. I thought of everything, Mabel, and then the man came back, collected his friends and the whole party with their usher at their head, came down the side aisle toward our box. I had just time to arrange my sad story and be thankful I had on my best hat when they reached the curtains of our box. I started up, but, Mabel, they went right on to the next box and sat down. I breathed again, but not very freely, for surely that man knew something about our box, or was my guilty conscience causing me hallucinations? Yet why guilty? What had I done? Apparently the worst was over now, but I was not at ease and thought the incident might at any moment repeat itself with different results. There was a blare of orchestra and the curtain went up; after one hurried glance at the stage I glued my eye to the door again. Fifteen minutes passed and nothing happened and so I turned around—turned to look into the interested eyes of the man in the other box. Perhaps he was a detective and watching me, but he didn’t look a bit like that, though he had quite a different look from the one a man ordinarily gives a girl in a pretty hat. My hat was very pretty—you remember the big black one—but it didn’t justify, the inquiring interest with which he regarded me. Yet he did not stare. Really he did not, Mabel, but was very decent. I looked at the stage now but sort of felt him there some way, and had a little feeling about the door, too, so I wasn’t very comfortable. When the curtain went down on the first act I expected to have a swarm of irate claimants for the box swoop down upon me, but not a soul appeared, and surely no one would come after that. I took the little envelope out of my bag and looked at it again. Nothing but 1229 Second on it—in pencil—. That was our number all right. Then something struck me. It was just 1229 Second, and ours is 1229 West Second. But after all that could make little difference, as heaps of our things come out marked that way and there is rarely a